‘Climategate’ university rejects accusations that it manipulated research February 26, 2010
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‘Climategate’ university rejects accusations that it manipulated research
The Telegraph, 25 February 2010
The university at the centre of the ”Climategate” row over global warming data today rejected accusations that it had lost or manipulated scientific research.
The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has been under fire since hacked emails, which sceptics claimed showed scientists manipulating climate data, were leaked online last year.
In a submission to Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee, which is investigating the disclosure of climate data from the unit, the university said it ”strongly rejected” accusations that it had manipulated or selected figures to exaggerate global warming.
The university also denied suggestions that it had breached Freedom of Information rules by refusing to release raw data.
And it insisted the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had not lost any primary data gathered from monitoring stations around the world.
According to the submission, allegations that scientists hid flaws and research findings were the result of misunderstandings of technical jargon or statistical analysis.
And it said the often-cited email which refers to a ”trick” to ”hide the decline” in a discussion of temperature measurements had been ”richly misinterpreted and quoted out of context”.
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Rajendra Pachauri to defend handling of IPCC after climate change science row February 24, 2010
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Rajendra Pachauri to defend handling of IPCC after climate change science row
By Geoffrey Lean
Telegraph, 24 February 2010
Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will defend his handling of a crisis that has shaken the world’s faith in his organisation at a meeting of environmental leaders in Bali.
He will try to save his job and shore up support for the IPCC in the wake of the discovery of errors in its latest report.
He is attending a special closed meeting of environment and climate ministers in the fringes of the annual assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Governing Council, the biggest such event since Copenhagen climate summit that ended in confusion and recriminations last December.
The governments are publicly backing Dr Pachauri, who they re-elected unopposed less than 18 months ago – the EU said last night that he had “done a good job, in general” and “deserves full confidence”. However privately, officials have expressed a wish that he will decide to step down before long.
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Monckton on the IPCC February 22, 2010
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Monckton on the IPCC
by Tom Minchin
Quadrant Online, February 22, 2010
The IPCC Is “Corrupt from top to bottom”
I met Lord Monckton at a luncheon in Melbourne during his recent tour of Australia. I was surprised journalists here had not thought to ask him how his views on climate science had evolved. Why had he become so interested in climate science fraud and its political implications? The Q and A that follows is the result of an interview conducted with him after his return to Scotland on February 15.
I began by asking him what had started him on the road to his YouTube-covered speech exposing the draft Copenhagen treaty:
Minchin: What first made you suspect the “climate change” research of recent decades was skewed?
Monckton: The CEO of a boutique finance house in the City of London asked me to have a look at “global warming” because his analysts could not decide whether it was real or not. I first realized something was wrong when I wanted to find out how to convert radiative forcings in Watts per square meter to temperature in Kelvin, but not once in 1,000 pages did the IPCC’s 2001 science assessment report reveal the existence of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, without which one cannot even begin the calculation. So obscurantist was the IPCC’s methodology for determining climate sensitivity that it took me two years to research the underlying equations, some of which I had to derive for myself. A scientific establishment that was confident of its results would have explained the matter clearly and concisely.
Minchin: What do you predict will be the outcome of the current wave of revelations about the quality of IPCC research?
Monckton: Governments, banks, businesses, environmental groups, academics, scientists, schoolteachers, and journalists have all nailed their colors so firmly to the mast of the IPCC’s sinking ship that they will do their level best to keep it afloat for as long as they can get away with it. The reaction of “Ed” Miliband, the Climate Change Minister in the UK, is typical. As soon as he learned of the IPCC’s defalcations, he announced a war on climate skeptics. Gradually, the opinion polls will continue to move against the IPCC as its absurdly exaggerated predictions continue to fail. Eventually, nations already hard-pressed as the second, deeper and longer trough of the double-dip recession sets in will decide that stopping the massive leakage of taxpayers’ cash represented by the climate nonsense would be a good idea. How long this process will take, I cannot say.
Minchin: How did science go so wrong on this issue? What caused the corruption of the scientific establishment?
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The Heretics: McIntyre and McKitrick February 20, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, global warming, Ross McKitrick, Steve McIntyre
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The Heretics: McIntyre and McKitrick
By Rich Trzupek
FrontPageMag, February 19th, 2010
When the infamous hockey-stick graph that purported to prove that human activities are causing runaway global warming was finally broken, there is some irony in the fact that a couple of Canadians did the breaking. Retired mining engineer Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, have been a thorn in the side of global warming alarmists for years. McIntyre, McKitrick and, more often, the acronym “M&M” to refer to the pair, are the subject of many discussions in the e-mails released from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last November.
Reading the e-mails, it quickly becomes clear that leading alarmist scientists, like Michael Mann at Penn State and Phil Jones at the CRU, seemed positively obsessed – almost to the point of appearing deranged at times – with discrediting McIntyre and McKitrick. For example, when the pair published their first hockey stick busting paper in 2003, Mann sent an angry e-mail to his colleagues, telling them how to deal with MM: “The important thing is to deny that this has any intellectual credibility whatsoever and, if contacted by any media, to dismiss this for the stunt that it is.”
Raymond Bradley, a climatologist with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and part of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), went even farther, suggesting that CRU should provide the “independent” voice that would discredit McIntyre and McKitrick: “…if an “independent group” such as you guys at CRU could make a statement as to whether the M&M effort is truly an “audit”, and if they did it right, I think that would go a long way to defusing the issue… If you are willing, a quick and forceful statement from The Distinguished CRU Boys would help quash further arguments.”
What did McIntyre and McKitrick do to put these climatologists on the defensive? To understand the significance of their work, we have to delve into global warming theory a bit. The disaster scenarios that alarmists predict can not be proven in real time. These scenarios are based on computer models that are horrendously complex and, even if modeling results match up with actual data during this year or that, it still proves nothing in terms of long-term trends.
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From Piltdown man to global warming February 19, 2010
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From Piltdown man to global warming
By Susan Martinuk
Calgary Herald, February 19, 2010
1912. The scene is a gravel pit in a small English village named Piltdown. A workman makes a grisly discovery of what appears to be a fossilized skull and jawbone. He subsequently passes the bone fragments to a local amateur paleontologist who determines them to be the jaw of an ape and the skull of a man. In other words, he had stumbled upon the long sought-after evolutionary missing link — a creature that is half-man and half-ape.
At least, that’s how it appeared. It wasn’t until 40 years later, after the discovery had greatly influenced the study of evolutionary theory, that it was revealed to be a hoax. The fossil was half-man and half-ape, but the jawbone of an orangutan had been deliberately combined with a human skull. So much for Piltdown Man.
Sometimes scientists make mistakes, get taken in by hoaxes or by data carefully crafted by overly-ambitious scientists. Sometimes the media takes science out of context to create a scientific theory that didn’t even exist.
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UN top climate change boss quits post February 18, 2010
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UN top climate change boss quits post
The Australian, February 19, 2010
YVO de Boer, the top UN climate change official, announced last night that he was resigning after a tumultuous four years in the job, marked by the failure to convince governments to agree on a post-Kyoto deal and revelations of a series of blunders in the UN’s 2007 report on climate change.
His departure as head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change takes effect on July 1, five months before 193 nations are due to reconvene in Mexico for another attempt to reach a binding worldwide accord on controlling greenhouse gases.
Mr de Boer is known to be disappointed with the outcome of the last summit in Copenhagen, which drew 120 world leaders but failed to reach more than a vague promise by several countries to limit carbon emissions. However, he denied that his decision to quit was a result of Copenhagen.
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The Continuing Climate Meltdown February 17, 2010
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The Continuing Climate Meltdown
The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2010
More embarrassments for the U.N. and ‘settled’ science.
It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.
First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.
Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there’s no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC’s headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.
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Dalton Minimum Repeat goes mainstream February 16, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in sunspots.Tags: climate change, david archibald, global warming, sunspots
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Dalton Minimum Repeat goes mainstream
From Watts Up With That, February 15, 2010
David Archibald writes in an email to WUWT:
The AGU Fall meeting has a session entitled “Aspects and consequences of an unusually deep and long solar minimum”. Two hours of video of this session can be accessed: http://eventcg.com/clients/agu/fm09/U34A.html
Two of the papers presented had interesting observations with implications for climate. First of all Solanki came to the conclusion that the Sun is leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum of the second half of the 20th century. He had said previously that the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than in the previous 8,000 years. This is his last slide:
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THE GREAT CLIMATE CHANGE RETREAT February 15, 2010
Posted by honestclimate in Discussions.Tags: climate change, Climategate, global warming, ipcc, Professor Phil Jones
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THE GREAT CLIMATE CHANGE RETREAT
By Ed Price
The Daily Express, February 15,2010
THERE has been no global warming for 15 years, a key scientist admitted yesterday in a major U-turn.
Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the “Climategate” affair, conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995.
The admission comes as new research casts serious doubt on temperature records collected around the world and used to support the global warming theory.
Researchers said yesterday that warming recorded by weather stations was often caused by local factors rather than global change.
The revelations will be seized upon by sceptics as fresh evidence that the science of global warming is flawed and climate change is not man-made.
The Daily Express has led the way in exposing flaws in the arguments supporting global warming.
Last month we revealed how the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was “speculation” lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The influential IPCC then admitted it had got the key claim wrong and announced a review.
The Daily Express has also published a dossier listing 100 reasons why global warming was part of a natural cycle and not man-made.
Yesterday it emerged that Professor Jones, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, had admitted he has trouble “keeping track” of the information.
Colleagues have expressed concern that the reason he has refused Freedom of Information requests for the data is that he has lost some of the crucial papers.
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New Paper in Science: Sea level 81,000 years ago was 1 meter higher while CO2 was lower February 12, 2010
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New Paper in Science: Sea level 81,000 years ago was 1 meter higher while CO2 was lower
Via Watts Up With That, February 11, 2010
This Week in SCIENCE, Volume 327, Issue 5967, Food Security dated February 12 2010, is now available at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol327/issue5967/twis.dtl
Standing High (requires free registration to view)
Fig. 1 Encrusted speleothems at various levels in caves from Mallorca. (A) Geologic map of Mallorca (10) and location of sampled caves (red dots). (B) Schematic cross-section through a coastal cave in Mallorca showing multiple carbonate encrustation levels. (C and D) Present-day and paleo levels of encrusted speleothems related to higher (E) and lower (F) sea-level stands. (G) Typical morphology for tidal range–related carbonate encrustation (size of speleothem, 20 cm). (H) Bathymetric map of the western Mediterranean region and the predicted present-day rate of sea-level change due to GIA [adapted from (15)
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An Honest Climate Debate 